The Impact of Displaying Diversity Information on the Formation of Self-assembling Teams

Despite the benefits of team diversity, individuals often choose to work with similar others. Online team formation systems have the potential to help people assemble diverse teams. Systems can connect people to collaborators outside their networks, and features can quantify and raise the salience of diversity to users as they search for prospective teammates. But if we build a feature indicating diversity into the tool, how will people react to it? Two experiments manipulating the presence or absence of a "diversity score" feature within a teammate recommender demonstrate that, when present, individuals avoid collaborators who would increase team diversity in favor of those who lower team diversity. These results have important practical implications. Though the increased access to diverse teammates provided by recommender systems may benefit diversity, designers are cautioned against creating features that raise the salience of diversity as this information may undermine diversity.